Floatinghead's ramblings about music and music-related themes interspersed with various interludes and home of Cabeza de Vaca radio show on Scanner FM, Barcelona.

Thursday, March 15, 2012

Listen to this – Alex Ross

The New Yorker music critic Alex Ross
achieved notable and deserved praise for his first book ”The rest is noise: listening to the 20th Century” which successfully fused the social and political
history of the 20th Century with many of the key musical changes.
That is, he told the history through the music and not in parallel or as a
reflection.

But while hardly as impactful as “The Rest
is Noise”, Ross’s second book “Listen to this”, published last year, goes perhaps further to demonstrate his
understanding of music and society, the depth of his ideas and the magnificent
quality of his prose,. After all, “The Rest Is Noise” is quite an “easy” book in
the sense that the story of music as it intertwined with 20th Century history is
inherently fascinating even to non-classical readers and has obvious mass appeal.
This is not to take away Ross’s exceptional telling of the tale from inside the
music, but what his second book reveals is that with a less friendly and
universal story to tell, Ross still has the capacity to teach, to excite and to
flow with a rare simplicity and mastery of language that is almost second to
none in music criticism or general biography and history.

The structure of the book is quite loose
and subjects range from classical music (the majority of the book) to more
popular artists such as Radiohead, Björk and Sonic Youth. Indeed, the non-classical
chapter on Bob Dylan is one of the highlights of the book and treats his subject
with the perfect blend of rare insight (Ross actually listened to the music and
not just the words or the stories), respect and the embarrassing awe of a fan.

Describing “A hard rain’s a-gonna fall” he
writes

“The first lines of “Hard Rain” – “Oh,
where have you been, my blue-eyed son? / And where have you been my darling
young one?” – are a nod to the ballad “Lord Randall” [a mediaeval
English-Scottish ballad], which begins “Oh, where have you been Lord Randall,
my son? / Oh, where you been, my handsome young man?” Dylan breaks down the
call and response of the original: his blue-eyed son answers not with two
lines, but with five… The song hangs on a musical trick of suspension: E and A
chords seesaw hypnotically as the number of answering phrases increases from
five to seven and eventually to twelve In the chorus – “And it’s a hard, and it’s
a hard…” – Dylan grasps for and finally gets the resolution, which in each verse
has moved a little farther out of reach.”

Ross’s strength is that he knows enough to
incorporate little touches of technical speak and lyric analysis to give a
telescopic closeness to the material and then suddenly pull back to give the global
picture to set the scene. Describing Dylan’s mystique he quotes from several
sources while adding his own interpretation:

“Greil Marcus [author of Invisible
Republic/The Old, Weird America]…captures the dementia that surrounded Dylan in
the mid-sixties, when two disparate youth cultures – rock-and-rollers and folkies
– jockeyed for control of his supposed message while older generations
struggled to comprehend what was going on. Not since Wagner has a musician been
subjected to such irrational, contradictory pressures”

Ross then goes on to quote Lester Bangs
from 1981:

“If people are going to dismiss or at best laugh at Dylan now as
automatically as they once genuflected, then nobody is going to know if he ever
makes a good album again. They’re not listening now, which just might mean they
weren’t listening then either”

At least we can be assured that Ross is
listening. And asking questions. One of the most interesting features of Ross’s
writing is that he directly proposes doubts, he opens doors and does not enter
inside. He leaves it to you to imagine or to accept that there remains mystery.

“In “Sad-eyed Lady of the Lowlands,” the
eleven minute ballad that closes “Blonde on Blonde”, Dylan fashions majestic
metaphors to capture the object of his affection – “your eyes like smoke and
prayers like rhymes” – and then, in the second-to-last verse, he clouds over: “They
wished you’d accept the blame for the farm.” What farm? What happened to it?
Why would she be to blame for it?”

But Dylan isn’t the only interesting
chapter in the book. One of the first describing the history of the Spanish
Chacona is immensely fascinating, following a bass line from the 16th
Century New World of Spanish conquest to Led Zeppelin’s “Dazed and Confused”
(via Jake Holmes’s track of the same name from his 1967 album “The Above Ground Sound”).

This chapter on the Chacona was treated to its own little
video explanation.

The chapter on the success of the Finnish
composer and conductor Esa-Pekker Salonen with the Los Angeles Philharmonic is
particularly revealing about the prejudices of classical audiences and the struggles
of institutional and governmental funding (see also a previous post in
relation to these issues and the Liceu in Barcelona). While there is also
plenty of incredible insightthere and elsewhere into how recording of classical
music has biased the interpretation of scores and ways of performance.

One personal curiosity is that Ross
mentions several times throughout the book the work of Catalan musician Jordi
Savall who has made an extensive career out of refashioning ancient music in
the modern age, going to extensive lengths to recreate extinct instruments and
research authentic techniques and scores to produce authenticity. The curiosity
of Savall is that he was the favourite musician of my old boss and something of
a joke amongst my colleagues for this reason. It was common practice for us to
attend at least one of his concerts every year.